The ghoul is on the lawn. Even across the plaza of the Capitol building, there at the far fringe of that bone-white marble, she is easily recognized. The wedge of that coif, the dark glimmer of her oversized necklace, the matching skirt and jacket, even that trim little figure — it's all there, a series of appurtenant signifiers assembled into a tawdry and macabre effigy, looking for all the world like the Speaker of the House of the United States of America, Nancy Pelosi. The most powerful woman in the nation. You'd know her anywhere.

Up close, the costume gets ugly. There's a cheap paper mask of Pelosi's face mashed on the mug of what appears to be a college student. The outfit, a knockoff, is stippled in dime-store blood. From her fingertips, this ghoul Pelosi dangles long strings of fake-blood-smeared dolls meant to represent fetuses. So it's a leftover ghoul, anachronistically summoned from some forgotten pro-life rally, here to remind anyone who passes that many lawn ghouls agree that Nancy Pelosi must answer for her sins — even if the Speaker is, at that very moment, announcing a plan to get health insurance for the little whelp behind the mask until she is twenty-seven years old. Next to her stands old-white-man ghoul, shambling and disheveled, holding up a placard that reads Kill the Bill. He too wears a mask you're supposed to recognize, but that doesn't stop a nearby cop from asking for a trick-or-treat clarification: Who are you supposed to be? Meet the ghoul Harry Reid. The cop shrugs, unimpressed that apparently Pelosi works better than Reid in the ghoul congress, too.

Not three hundred feet away, Nancy Pelosi, the living, breathing human version, stands at the base of the Capitol steps, centerpiecing the rollout of the Democrats' version of the health-care plan. Pelosi defers to other members of Congress, who in turn introduce mom-and-pop constituents, there to tell the horror stories of the uninsured. You can read Pelosi's every twitch and sway. Today her empathy seems practiced, her concern meted out, as if there were somewhere else to be. She often looks, in truth, a little less than thrilled, seems jumpy and bedeviled and just a smidge frozen. It feels like she's been tapping her toes through the predictable arc of testimonials from the bused-in choir of middle America when she takes the mic.

At the sound of Pelosi's voice, the lawn ghouls jockey for better position on the green. This is what they came for. One starts in with a bullhorn now, chanting Pelosi's name, that name, the name that seems to say it all, dactylic and singsong, rasping the name over the heads of the crowd, a five-beat incantation on a snare drum: Nan-cee Pel-ohh-si, Nan-cee Pel-ohh-si. Now she is a howling sentence fragment, a subject without predicate hanging over the proceedings. The ghoul keeps on like that — Nan-cee Pel-ohh-si — taunting the most important woman in the country with no more than the sound of her own name. That's when it's evident that these people aren't really here to protest the health-care bill; they are here to register a performance of their animus for the woman. Pelosi does not bite. She proceeds apace. When it comes to detractors, she is thick-skinned and scaly.

It's got to suck, shepherding through a decent career's worth of legislation in the first eleven months of your Speakership under a Democratic president, with your majority, pinning the needle at 218 — that simple majority of the House — again and again, outworking every member of your own party on every major agenda item sent your way, by every measure out-succeeding the president himself, only to watch your approval rating drag the barroom floor like Dick Cheney's knuckles. To paste together a cantankerous majority time and again, with the urgent and overloud drumbeat of anxious White House aides throbbing in your ears, only to get picked at because you tend to stammer and mechanically chop the air with the side of your hand during the weekly press conferences.

But it does not suck to win. Three years into her tenure as Speaker of the House, legislating the snot out of the Democratic agenda, Pelosi has quietly cleared the docket for her aggressive to-do list. Certainly 2008 was Obama's. He earned it. But 2009? Not so much. Pelosi wrestled that one for her own simply by executing her duties — two escalating briar-patch wars, one caterwauling economy, and all those thick and meaty state-by-state unemployment numbers aside. With the midterm elections ten months away, you can mark it down: Nancy Pelosi is winning. Not hearts and minds — those she leaves to Obama; they are his to lose. The Speaker wins alliances and coalitions. The Speaker wins votes in the House. They are the only relevant measure of her success. She doesn't particularly need anyone to love her. She doesn't work for that. She simply wants to win.

They blather about her wardrobe and her hair. And may I say: fabulous hair. The hair of a twenty-eight-year-old, obedient and lush, the effect of her early-morning — every morning — trip to the stylist at the hair salon at the Four Seasons in Georgetown. And they talk of her odd appetite in singsong mentions of the bowls of foiled chocolates that sit on every flat surface in her office, the occasional bowl of ice cream for breakfast. Most people say they've never seen her eat anything else. Congressmen. Reporters. Waiters. They all say it. There are broad allusions to her vanity — that she won't leave her office till her looks are just right — and her weakness for celebrity — that any celebrity who traipses onto the Hill, from Bono to Brad Pitt, must make a photo stop. And of course, speculation on whether she's had plastic surgery, and quality assessments of the work she may or may not have had done. In an era of rich politicians, Pelosi is, without apology, a rich woman. So people talk about her money.

Those more proximate, the ones who work with her, describe her component strengths as a long memory, acute negotiating skills, the ability to outwork anyone. The mistake with Pelosi has to do with the different means of dismissing the woman: the idea commonly held on the Right that Pelosi is merely a San Francisco liberal, best characterized by nicknames that never really catch on except in the seamy vacuum of Internet discussion boards, a run-amok progressive who stumbled into power because of her husband's money and influence; that Pelosi is some left-wing Chimera belched up from a cocktail party at the Presidio — but this is a tired bromide even for windup monkeys like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

"I used to get angry at some of her staff members and say, 'You're not doing enough to, you know, fend off these attacks on the Speaker. They're inaccurate, they're stereotypical,' " says Connecticut representative John Larson, chair of the House Democratic Caucus. "Her attitude was, don't spend a minute of time fending off attacks that are going to come on me. Every attack on me is one that isn't launched on another Democrat. She says if I spend any time at all getting down in the weeds on those issues, then I lose focus on what the big agenda — on what the real prize is. Nancy doesn't lose focus."

Still, she doesn't exactly put herself on display, doesn't ask much for scrutiny. Her press appearances are safe, her every public statement scripted to the bone. Her office canceled an in-person interview for this story, along with considerable access to her schedule, after another story in an outside-the-Beltway publication, to which she had granted an audience, apparently upset her.

There has been shape, calculation, and momentum in every stage of Pelosi's career. The daughter of legendary Baltimore mayor Tommy D'Alesandro, she grew up in the most elemental tangle of street-by-street, local-precinct politics in the 1950s and interned for Maryland senator Daniel Brewster alongside Steny Hoyer, now House majority leader and Pelosi's onetime rival for leadership positions. "In many ways, she's still a Baltimore city local politician," Hoyer says. "She grew up with her father, and she knows how to work locally — to work the neighborhoods of Congress." Pelosi crammed five pregnancies into seven years, and after moving to California in 1969, she soon found her way into the elite circles of Democratic fundraising. This got her named Democratic party chair in 1981. In 1987, with her youngest a senior in high school, Pelosi, who had never been elected to public office, was practically anointed by a dying Sala Burton, wife of longtime California congressman Phillip Burton, to assume the Burton family seat in her San Francisco congressional district.

And while liberal she definitely is, representing as she does a liberal district, Pelosi routinely gets berated by the Left, as when she blocked the impeachment of Bush in 2006. Then there was the Stupak amendment, attached to the health-care bill at the last minute. It excluded private insurance companies from the government exchange if they provide funding for abortions. In a final squat thrust of compromise, Pelosi, a pro-choice foot soldier, a Catholic who's stood up to the creepy, brow-mopping bishops of her own church to defend her views, condoned Stupak — clamped it on the bill and passed it to the Senate. Liberal apoplexy on that one is already legend. So the question is, Did she yield? Or did she compromise? Inarguably, she finished the job, gained passage for the bill. Sorting Stupak would come later.

"Nancy is definitely a liberal," Hoyer says. "The difference is, she is an operational liberal. People aren't used to that on either side."

Pelosi's in Broward County, Florida, the onetime electoral center of the universe, on the convoluted occasion of an announcement of proposed legislation that could close the doughnut hole for Medicare prescription drugs within ten years. It's the sort of victory only a legislator celebrates, or explains. Pelosi's here to listen to health-care workers and local leaders. It's Florida. Many of them are older than she is.

She is sixty-nine, and this makes for most people's idea of an old woman. Never mind that she is collared from day to day by men who are older — Rangel, seventy-nine; Waxman, seventy; Dingle, eighty-three. In the course of the event, Pelosi acknowledges her age often, perhaps too often, referring to herself repeatedly as a senior, as a grandmother, as having been "doing this" for so long. In this fashion, she tacitly invites both affirmation and dismissal. To a seventy-five-year-old retired carpet salesman living out his days in Florida on Social Security, she's asserting that she's one of the gang: We're in this together.

It's also a means of inviting people to ignore her, for her to be less seen. When an aging doctor intimates at her press conference that he'd like to have a dance, she says they'd be doing so "senior to senior." She wants a laugh, except it's not really funny. It's a lurching, lousy moment in a room in which one wall is lined with eight meaty law-enforcement officials, most of them head-shaven and mustached, each densely jowled, staring at her the way many men do, coldly, dispassionately, arms folded tightly over flak jackets. And Pelosi cannot get a laugh. Not ever. She holds out a hand as if to dance. And no one laughs. This is usually what happens when she tries comedy: It comes in the form of a stabbing, ad-libbed one-liner, ending with her solitary huffing chuckle into the microphone.

Outside, behind barricades, across the parking circle through which Pelosi's town car will never pass, there are more men. These are the tea-party guys, shouting her name in a great effluent spray across the hot pavement, toward a set of double doors, toward the hall where Pelosi speaks. "Liar!" one of them shouts. "Pelosi liar!" Again with the fragments, again drumbeats. This one is more like a bongo.

"She didn't tell us she was coming," one of them says as I approach. "She won't get near us!"

I'm not sure why he feels they should have been invited to launch invectives from the greensward.

"I'm certain that she's an interesting person," one of them, a sixty-four-year-old who tells me he's an investment banker, says. He's wearing the uniform of a sixty-four-year-old retired white guy: jeans. Baseball hat. Golf shirt. "I'm certain that she'd be nice enough to have dinner with. I know she's a good grandmother, mother. But she can't be trusted. She's shown that again and again. Thousand-page bills, middle-of-the-night legislation. She's rich. She's arrogant. She's out of touch. And she does everything in hiding." The fact that he could be describing the behavior of most elected officials in our mutual lifetime does not seem to occur to him.

"She's a monster," says another. "I can't even look at her."

The banker glares at this one. "There's no need for that."

"I can't," the second one says, then he bellows toward the doors: "Liar! Nancy Pelosi!"

"We won't even get to see her," the banker says. "She won't even show her face to us." By that he means the seven protesters who are gathered there.

When Pelosi speaks, she flickers back and forth between frailty and strength, focus and distraction. She's lousy in front of a mic. Often she grinds out answers to questions haltingly, hits snags when trying to recall names or particular programs or years. At her weekly press conferences in Washington, she shows none of the muscular familiarity with reporters that is typical of her station. There's no sense that she's in any long-term dialogues with anyone but her fellow members of Congress.

It may be that she doesn't know who the various reporters are. Staff members relate that she reads little of her press coverage, never looks at the Internet, watches no pundits. "She doesn't go down rabbit holes," one said. "She goes home, curls up, and calls her grandchildren."

So Pelosi doesn't charm a room, and at first you assume she can't. She's most comfortable with talking points, closes down particular questions by showing her palm. Snarly. Rude. Sure. It has to do with the fact that Pelosi is all about the execution of her job. Everything about her affect says that the press conference may be the least productive thirty-minute block of a typical Thursday for her; that she is too old, or perhaps dodgy, to be able to access the muscle memory of that kind of minor-league seduction.

But that disconnect, that inability to generate a dialogue with people who can't directly advance her agenda, is studied and purposeful. Why romance the press, after all? Her district is safe. The votes she cares most about are on the floor of the House. This separation may lead to her occasional lapses in focus — she doesn't seem to have any rhythm when there's a question she isn't expecting. She occasionally falls down the well completely, though. Loses every sense of what she looks like. And people — some people — love to watch the bonfire that is Pelosi uncollected. An example would be her stammering, page-flipping response to a question about whether she'd been briefed on the Bush administration's prodigious use of waterboarding. It's still pinned on YouTube, still garnering fresh viewer comments seven years after the fact. And while positing that YouTube commentaries might be a way to get a fix on the cultural tolerance of misogyny is like going into a frat-house laundry room in search of skid-marked underwear — you know what you're going to get — the depth of the malice there for Pelosi is significant. And sure, she falls apart when asked about waterboarding — about why she didn't stick her little foot in the door on that bullshit from the very first moment she knew — but at least it was waterboarding that flummoxed her. Maybe that's regret she can't locate on her pages. Still, the little swish of panic in her gut, her shaking hands reaching to find a page in her notes, the eyes held wide — it looks a little vulnerable and sad, like the public servant she is, the one who translates best in private, a beautiful woman who cannot effectively occupy the public stage.

It's hard to find members of the House willing to comment on the Pelosi style. Republicans, bulldozed, hunkered down, cowed, waiting out the months until they expect the majority back to their side, see no upside in talking about her strengths. "There's nothing in it for me," one press aide said in turning down a request for a comment. And the negatives have been out there a long time, he says. No need to point them out.

Inside the Democratic party, those who cross Pelosi often come to terms with her legendary memory. ("I don't know if she remembers everything," one San Francisco newspaper editor said, "but she damn sure doesn't forget.") Her brother, Tommy D'Alesandro III, himself a former mayor of Baltimore, sees memory as her inheritance from their father and a product of growing up in the grip of local politics: "My father could look at you on a Sunday in the middle of March and say, 'I think the tailor's daughter is turning eighteen today. Go down there and get her registered to vote.' And I'd go down there and he was right. His memory was a very useful political tool for him. My sister has that, too."

"Of course," D'Alesandro says, "he was a very tough man. Big. Very confrontational. With him, there was some fear. My sister, I think she's more of a consensus builder."

Hang on a tick, Little Tommy. "There's a lot of fear," says one freshman congressman who asked not to be named. "She knows every vote, every margin. Even the margins on votes she won are a matter of discussion. She'll call out anyone on a vote from the leadership on down."

Eric Massa, freshman Democrat from New York's 29th District, up by Rochester, who crossed Pelosi to vote against the health-care bill, agrees with D'Alesandro. "She's not an agent of fear. She's an agent of persuasion," he says. "If I had to put her into a folder, I'd say she tries, genuinely, to persuade you.

"She's one of the most misrepresented and least understood leaders in Washington," he continues. "For some reason that I haven't figured out, polling suggests that a large percentage of American people hate her. And yet she is literally one of the kindest people, one of the most principled people that I've met here. Now, she and I disagree on a lot of policy stuff. We do. But even in the face of that disagreement, she has never been anything other than absolutely respectful, friendly, accommodating to me, and to anyone I have seen her with."

John Larson characterizes her as the tireless sum of these parts: "Something that doesn't get talked about is that she knows how to write. She knows how to defer and give credit to other people. She has more meetings than anybody probably in recorded history." The things the public doesn't see — the things she writes, the deference she gives, the meetings she holds behind her doors — define the Speaker for the people who work with her.

Ask around Congress enough and you hear the characterization that Pelosi is an "Italian-grandmother type," which is about as interesting as saying Newt Gingrich was a Pillsbury Doughboy type, winning his battles by staying white and giggling. But the comparison is clear: fear and respect. A fierce memory. Stern discipline doled out with a glance. A sort of genetic élan for managing a rumpus. Power in proximity. But the idea that Pelosi manages things with a well-placed jab of a dinner fork now and again is dismissive of her work ethic. The fact that no one hesitates to dump this analogic gem on the table — I hear the Italian-grandmother thing seven times over the course of a month — eventually gives the sense that Pelosi herself has given her okay to the comparison. "Ask her," Massa says to me. "I believe she will agree with the characterization."

Three weeks after the roll out, and with the ghouls long gone, Pelosi makes an appearance at a USO event, snug in a foyer of the Rayburn House Office Building, to stuff care packages for women soldiers. Jill Biden is there, too. She speaks and Pelosi stands by, motionless and patient. After four minutes, she falters and touches her watch. She doesn't look, but she's tipping her impatience.

Then she proceeds to the tables, where she buzzes through the assembly of each care package, pulling one item from each bin, dropping it into her bag. Pelosi moves quickly, assembling bag after bag, working from one bin to the next. A magazine. A tube of lipstick. A pack of moist towelettes. Then disposable razors. Beef jerky. Maxi pads.

At one point the maxi pads are running low and she actually asks me if I can help get some more. "We need some more of these," she says, rattling her hand around the mostly empty bin of maxi pads. "You think you could find someone to fill this for me?"

I just stare back. So she asks the woman next to me. "What about you?" she says. "Can you do that for me?" She doesn't care so much who's who, or what anyone thinks about the Speaker of the House fishing for feminine products. She's doing a job.

But that would be a cheap moment to end on, wouldn't it? Leaving the Speaker of the House of the United States of America with her hand stuck in the non-metaphoric maxi-pad bin, still getting things done in the House at every level. Just another caricature drawn in the space she keeps around herself. I am bound to resist. So I go back to watching her. Her press guy tells me she is leaving that night, so I decide to watch the last vote before a long weekend from the press gallery. It's a fairly meaningless amendment on doctor payment plans that Republicans have decided to oppose. Such are the small victories they seek.

Eric Cantor, the minority whip from Virginia, is on the floor long before Pelosi, hectoring the physicians in his party — there are nine of them — to fall in line and vote to table it. He seems at wits' end. Pelosi's been ignoring him. On the floor, there are six members to start, then fourteen, thirty, then as the vote nears, they pile in more rapidly.

The chamber is cavernous, but somehow stuffy and tight. It looks purposefully faded, consciously jenky. Working the floor seems to be everybody's business at times like these. Conversations are held in pockets, urgings given to the doubters from up close. Pelosi arrives just as the vote begins, comes through the center rear door, takes a look at the assembly. Her manner is both curious and assured. She is always easy to look at from a distance. I don't mean easy on the eyes but in her manner, certain and true. She checks in for a few minutes with the Blue Dogs, the caucus of right-leaning Democrats, who sit far back and in the middle of the aisle, then visits with her pal Barney Frank. She watches the goings-on as she speaks to him, then leans back over her seat to drop a word in with a freshman. Then she stands in the center aisle and talks with a Republican, Tom Petri of Wisconsin, who looks concerned. Eventually she takes his hand between hers and they talk a good six minutes. She looks up at the board above my head, where votes are recorded. The doctors start to file past Cantor to vote. Pelosi squints as a single GOP physician votes for the amendment. She waits, then joins Hoyer on the carpet for a final powwow. Her progress through the room is both birdlike and certain, at first appearing random but, when you deconstruct it, purposeful. This is where she works. Her house. Eventually the amendment is passed by the wash of Democrats as Pelosi watches from the top of an aisle on the far left, her will served, her arms crossed, murmuring to two other members. They are in recess now. Soon Pelosi will be on a plane. She's flying out to be with her family, but she's in no rush to leave this house.